Opinion

Christine Lagarde has taken the helm of the European Central Bank (ECB) at a time of rising skepticism over the power of monetary policy. Critics say that the central bank has no tools left to bring inflation back to its target of close to, but below, 2%. The ECB is now a helpless bystander, they claim, as the power to ...

Investors are turning their back on fossil fuels. Sweden’s central bank sold its holdings of sovereign debt issued by Canadian and Australian local governments dependent on fossil fuel extraction, the Riksbank said. A day later, the European Investment Bank said it would stop providing funding for conventional fossil fuels by 2022. One response might be to yawn. Divestment has “reduced ...

Although President Donald Trump and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell have been at odds on Twitter and in official statements, the two share remarkably similar views about the economy and what needs to be done to improve it. The trick for the chairman will be to carry out monetary policy without appearing to cave to the president — and the ...

Amazon.com Inc. loves to tinker and test. Sometimes projects that seemed like mindless fiddling — the Kindle e-reader, the Prime shopping club, its Amazon Web Services cloud-computing operation — turned out to be important advances for the company, its customers and the technology industry. Despite that history, I have to ask: Does Amazon know what it’s doing in groceries? When ...

The most favourable thing that can be said of President Trump’s 2017 tax cut — whose cost is reckoned at roughly $1.5 trillion over a decade — is that it disappointed. A harsher but perhaps more accurate judgment is that it flopped. It didn’t perform as advertised. This is not just a verdict on the past; it’s also a warning ...

The United Nations’ recent report that 200,000 Syrians have been displaced as a result of the Turkish-led military operation in the country’s northeast highlighted what many of us already knew: Syria is the worst human-rights catastrophe of the 21st century. In just the past two weeks, we have learned about more executions, beatings, and war crimes against civilians committed by ...

Samir Assaf, the head of HSBC Holdings Plc’s investment bank, referred to himself as the “last man standing” among his generation of peers in London. Last week, it was revealed that he’ll be leaving the post. It won’t be the last big change at the giant Anglo-Asian lender. Slowing global growth, declining interest rates, trade tensions and unrest in Hong ...

Two- and-a-half years after the Indian central bank took the highly unusual step of directing banks to put 12 large corporate debtors into bankruptcy, the most closely watched of the “distressed dozen” cases has finally been resolved. With the Supreme Court in New Delhi clearing the decks for the sale of Essar Steel India Ltd., the Ruia family has accepted ...

Interest rates could surge, exchange rates may collapse, the sun might stop shining brightly. Every conceivable danger an investor needs to be aware of in an initial public offering is discussed in the August prospectus of Sterling and Wilson Solar Ltd., among the world’s biggest engineering contractors to solar farms. And yet, the risk that struck hapless shareholders was buried ...

Hong Kong’s protests are damping real estate activity, spurring speculation of a long-overdue tumble in the city’s notoriously expensive housing market. Prices are likely to prove more resilient than some expect. Home transactions have dropped by more than half from this year’s peak in May, before the unrest began, to 3,447 in September and 4,001 last month, figures from the ...